When Covid-19 sent people home in early 2020, the computer scientist Tom Zahavy rediscovered chess. He had played as a kid and had recently read Garry Kasparov’s Deep Thinking, a memoir of the grandmaster’s 1997 matches against IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue. He watched chess videos on YouTube and The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix. Despite… Continue reading Google DeepMind Trains ‘Artificial Brainstorming’ in Chess AI
Spinning Through Time | RealClearBooks
The following is a condensed version of “Spinning Through Time” by Asheesh Agarwal, published at Law & Liberty. What would it feel like to live in Middle Earth? In its adaptation of Robert Jordan’s classic series, Amazon Prime immerses viewers in the world of Wheel of Time (WoT) as well as any production in recent… Continue reading Spinning Through Time | RealClearBooks
The Astonishing Behavior of Recursive Sequences
In mathematics, simple rules can unlock universes of complexity and beauty. Take the famous Fibonacci sequence, which is defined as follows: It begins with 1 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. The first few numbers are: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 … Simple, yes,… Continue reading The Astonishing Behavior of Recursive Sequences
UFO Nuclear Missile Shootdown (Big Sur UFO Incident)
Podcast: Download MYS285: In 1964, the US Air Force was conducting tests of nuclear weapons off the coast of Big Sur, California. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss the claim that a UFO shot down one of those missiles designed to carry nuclear devices, whether aliens were responsible, and whether it was meant as a… Continue reading UFO Nuclear Missile Shootdown (Big Sur UFO Incident)
AI Designs Little Robots in 30 Seconds, and They Keep Sprouting Legs
Artificial intelligence can design an autonomous robot in 30 seconds flat on a laptop or smartphone. It’s not quite time to panic about just anybody being able to create the Terminator while waiting at the bus stop: as reported in a recent study, the robots are simple machines that scoot along in straight lines without… Continue reading AI Designs Little Robots in 30 Seconds, and They Keep Sprouting Legs
The Parties Have Irreconcilably Different Visions for America
“It’s so nice to have Representative Jones, who’s a Republican, and Representative Smith, a Democrat, with us today. Even though they belong to different parties, we know that we all want the same thing for our community, and our nation.” As the former CEO of the Chester County Chamber, I presided at countless events where… Continue reading The Parties Have Irreconcilably Different Visions for America
Cryptographers Devise an Approach for Total Search Privacy
So even with his hope renewed, Wichs assumed that any version of these programs that was secure was still a long way off. Instead, he and his co-authors — Wei-Kai Lin, now at the University of Virginia, and Ethan Mook, also at Northeastern — worked on problems they thought would be easier, which involved cases… Continue reading Cryptographers Devise an Approach for Total Search Privacy
NewsGuard: Surrogate the Feds Pay to Keep Watch on the Internet and Be a Judge of the Truth
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool. A self-described “vaccine against misinformation.” NewsGuard Technologies In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as… Continue reading NewsGuard: Surrogate the Feds Pay to Keep Watch on the Internet and Be a Judge of the Truth
In the ‘Wild West’ of Geometry, Mathematicians Redefine the Sphere
If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic on a rainy afternoon, you’ve probably watched raindrops racing each other down the car window. When pairs of droplets collide, they merge into a new droplet, losing their separate identities. That merging is possible because the water droplets are just about spherical. When shapes are flexible — as… Continue reading In the ‘Wild West’ of Geometry, Mathematicians Redefine the Sphere
This Code Breaking Quaker Poet Hunted Nazis
Known as “America’s first female cryptanalyst,” Elizebeth Smith Friedman was a master code breaker who played a pivotal role in both World Wars. For many years, no one knew what she had done, not even her own family. Code breaking wasn’t Smith Friedman’s plan to begin with. In the mid-1910s she was a 23-year-old college… Continue reading This Code Breaking Quaker Poet Hunted Nazis